“Ten seconds!” Kevin squealed, his voice going up an octave.
“Okay, I cast first, you turn the valve, and then pull it out,” I yelled. I realized belatedly that as the timer was reaching zero, the music had once again risen in volume. They were also raising the volume of the commentators to compensate.
Carl: Donut, if this doesn’t work, do what we talked about before. Get to Imani and Elle once you hit the next floor.
Donut replied, but I waved it away. The timer hit zero.
Lusca swallowed at the same moment. She, as I hoped, raised her head slightly upward in order to fully get that massive hunk of metal down her throat. The water rushed back, all of us getting pulled down. Ahead, the Akula disappeared down the shark’s gullet.
At the same moment, just as we started to flow downward, I slammed onto Protective Shell.
We were moving fast toward the back of the creature’s throat, but the shark was still swimming forward. The static sphere of protection shot away, quickly outpacing us as it rocketed toward the back of the creature’s throat, skirting just below the white flesh of the shark’s mouth.
I’d done this twice before, using it to kill everything on a train. The spell’s radius was three meters plus a half a meter for every point of intelligence, meaning the sphere that formed and then rocketed away was about 12 meters in diameter.
I was hoping that the spell would act like a bullet, punching a hole through the city boss, piercing her brain, and then continuing on its way all the way through the tentacles and out the back as her momentum propelled her forward.
Instead, it did something a little unexpected. The city boss stopped dead in the water, as if she’d slammed into a wall. The top half of Lusca’s mouth bent back and opened, breaking as it splayed so much, it curved over her own eyes, cartilage and bone snapping, like the hood of a car that popped open while you were driving down the highway. One moment we were in the monster’s mouth, and the next the top jaw of shark was peeled up and away, exposing us to open ocean. Teeth shattered as the boss was pushed down and into the ocean floor by the floating, immoveable spell. All the remaining babies were instantly killed as the soft palate of her mouth was suddenly upside down and outside and exposed and squeezed by the pressure of the depth.
The spell’s passage had indeed grievously wounded Lusca, but despite the horrific injury to her mouth, she wasn’t yet dead.
At that moment, however, I didn’t yet see or know what the spell had done. As we moved toward the throat, Katia activated the rocket, which increased our speed. And at the same time, she pulled the giant, 25-foot, activated buzzsaw out of her inventory and held onto the back of it for dear life.
The Leatherface plan was simple. While we flew the house, if we called “Leatherface,” Katia was to drop the giant buzzsaw over the edge and let it hang free. We’d built a chain specifically for it. We’d then use the dangling buzzsaw as a melee weapon for the balloon.
The buzzsaw was heavy, but much lighter than one would think. I’d been hoping that with our forward momentum from the rocket along with the swallowing push toward the boss’s stomach, we’d follow the same path of destruction wrought by the protective shell, all the way through the shark and out the back. Lusca was so damn big, I didn’t know if that would actually kill her or not, but I hoped we’d get her brain, and if not, do enough damage that it’d let us flee.
But instead of rocketing forward, we started to pinwheel.
The enormous pressure of the water pushed onto us, but we were already spinning by the time I realized we were in open ocean. We flew in the opposite direction I’d anticipated, like we’d been ejected through the windshield thanks to the boss’s sudden, violent stop. The rocket continued to blast air, causing us to spin even faster. We vomited from the shark’s mouth, still pinwheeling forward, slowed, and then reversed direction, cleaving straight through the center of the octo-shark’s now-on-the-outside upper snout. The screaming buzzsaw was not hampered by the water or the depth, and it cut through Lusca as if she was nothing more than a soft piece of calamari being pierced by a hot knife. We continued to spin, picking up speed and curving downward as we cut through the shark’s head.
Only when one of the massive tentacles, just as wide as the length of the buzzsaw, slammed down on us did we stop. The rocket fizzled out, the buzzsaw slammed into the rocky ground of the floor, burying itself completely, yet still screaming. Katia let go, causing all three of us to go flying.
I spun and twirled, hitting the rocky ground of the ocean, skipping off the floor and rolling. My health was slowly going down. My head spun, nausea washing over me. I continued to tumble and roll, coming to a stop against a rock. It felt as if I had a dozen sandbags on my shoulders. I twisted, trying to see what damage we’d done. The green-hued world was a sea of upset silt and blood.
A full page of notifications flew by. I could still hear the two announcers, and they were screaming their heads off. The swirling silt cleared, and I saw it.
Lusca, the octo-shark floated on her side on the ocean floor, her upper jaw horrifically peeled back and split. A jagged line of red curved along the top of the massive, building-sized creature, not perfectly centered, but enough. We’d cleaved right through her tiny little brain.
Behind me, the buzzsaw was buried all the way into the ocean’s floor. It made a strangled noise, and suddenly the whole thing broke apart, pieces flying every which way. One of the round buzzsaws dislodged and shot through the water, spinning and disappearing into the darkness, like a tire rocketing off a crashed car.
Winner!
More notifications flew by. I saw a fan box notification. I waved it all away. I clicked another scroll of water breathing. The music abruptly stopped. Only one notice remained on my screen.
Warning: At this depth, your health will decrease by two percent per second.
Shit.
Tran: Help. I can’t get up.
I saw his dot on the map. Close. Katia had pulled herself to her feet about a hundred meters away.
Donut: CARL I JUST WENT UP A LEVEL, AND I DIDN’T EVEN DO ANYTHING. I SHOULD STAY BACK MORE OFTEN. THIS IS GREAT.
I didn’t have to time to revel in the sheer insanity of what’d just happened. We had to get back to the remains of the Akula. Was it still inside of the shark? It had been swallowed. I hit a health potion as I tramped toward Tran. I picked him up and pulled him over my shoulder.
“Can you see the boat? If we get inside, we won’t have to deal with the pressure,” I called.
“Yes. It’s about halfway down the shark’s throat,” Katia called, pulling up next to me. She’d reverted to her she-hulk form. We couldn’t swim. We had to walk, like we were pushing through a blizzard. She looked as if she might vomit.
“Okay,” I said, struggling to speak. We didn’t have far to go. “Let’s get back in there.”
As we trudged back to the boat, Vadim finally answered us.
Vadim: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I panicked. It was stupid. I sealed the room.
Carl: We’ll worry about that later. Just chill there for a bit. We’re coming to you.
Vadim: I sealed the room. I had to. The door is different. It’s not going to let me open it again if there’s water on the other side. I can’t get out, and I just got a warning about my oxygen levels. I have five minutes left, and then I must use the last escape hatch. I’m sorry.
Goddamnit.
Carl: The boat is still inside the damn shark. I don’t know if it’ll work. It might. It might not. Do you have a shield spell? Make sure you turn it on before you try it.
Katia had, in her inventory, a group of empty, reinforced barrels welded together and attached by a chain that she could pull from her inventory, and they’d rocket to the surface like a balloon. We didn’t have to worry about decompression stops. We’d designed them so we’d be able to quickly ascend from a depth of 500 meters. But we were now on the damn ocean floor, and I knew they’d crush like tin cans the moment she pulled them
out. The depth charges had gone off, and they were in thicker containers than the barrels.
Maybe if she wrapped herself around them. I didn’t know. We’d have to try.
“Look!” Katia said, pointing up.
I looked. Above us, thousands of the giant jellyfish floated. They were everywhere, glowing blue. They filled the world above us.
“There’s a layer of smaller jellyfish below them, too,” Tran groaned from my shoulder. He was losing five percent of health per second. Luckily we all had literally dozens of healing potions. But even that many would soon run low.
Carl: Uh, Vadim. Maybe I should blow the hatch to get you out. I don’t think you should try it.
Ahead, a mighty hissing noise filled the water. A line of bubbles appeared as the escape pod rocketed up and away, like the glass elevator at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It’d popped out at a steep angle, but the elevator-like escape hatch curved upward until it was headed straight up.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, following his trajectory. “He punched right through the top of the shark. We should’ve had him do it while it was still alive.”
He also punched through the line of jellyfish like they weren’t even there. He was soon gone. I knew that the elevator surrounding him would peel away once he was out of the water, and he’d land, supposedly gently, in the necropolis. I had no idea how that was going to work. I suspected it’d be through one of the entrance holes at the top.
“Don’t be too jealous,” Katia muttered. “He’s going to find himself alone in the necropolis.”
“Yeah, at least he’s out of here. You know what we’re gonna have to do, right?” I said. “They’re pretty much making us do it.”
“I know,” Katia said. “We’ll wait until everyone is in safe rooms.”
Vadim: Oh god, oh god. They’re in the pod with me. Oh god.
Carl: What? What?
Vadim: The pain amplifier…
Warning: This message is from a deceased crawler.
“Yikes,” was all I could bring myself to say.
Neither Bobby nor Morris the human spider guy answered me. It didn’t say either of the tomb raiders was dead on my chat, so I didn’t know what was going on there. But we couldn’t wait any longer. Everyone else was in a safe room. Donut, Louis, and Firas were back in Hump Town. They were in the personal space with Juice Box and half the town. Juice Box was not taking the death of her brother well. I was having Donut and Mordecai relay to her what we wanted her to do, and Donut believed she was going to agree.
We weren’t certain enough of the coordinates to the top of the Necropolis, so we had to dial in the location just outside of Pandinus, the town on the land quadrant. The plan was simple. We’d use the Gate of the Feral Gods to teleport ourselves to the town and then we’d get our asses to a saferoom as the god was summoned, and then we’d see what happened next.
I was keenly aware that we were possibly about to fuck over everybody in the bubble. Gwen was pretty vocal with this fact, but even she seemed morbidly curious about what was going to happen next. I also worried about the safety of Chris and Maggie, but there really wasn’t anything I could do about it. If the mountain exploded or something, we’d all probably be dead. Not just them.
The necropolis remained half-filled with water. I’d had her turn off the drain once I read how to kill Quetzalcoatlus. And now thanks to the Map of the Stars I’d received from the city boss corpse, we’d be able to see exactly where she, along with every other boss, was on the map. Katia could actually see her right now, and she was right by the exit, still fully submerged.
Once the storm started in a few hours, the lightning would hopefully hit the tower and zap everything still inside the submerged parts of the necropolis. And probably the water quadrant, too, which was another reason why we had to get the hell out of here.
“Ready?” I said. I’d already dialed in the first watch and placed it in the first spot of the winding box. The second watch was also dialed to the time. We’d stepped back out onto the ocean floor.
“Let’s do it,” Katia said. Tran nodded nervously.
“Remember. Go through quickly. Don’t linger in the middle. I’ll go last.”
I placed the second watch in, closed the lip, and turned the winding mechanism on the box of the watch. It took less than a second for it to start to glow.
Quest Complete. The Gate of the Feral Gods.
I opened the winding box, and it rumbled in my hand. A swirling portal appeared in front of us, huge, bigger than I expected. The portal was twenty feet tall.
“Gah,” I cried as the three of us were instantly sucked through before I could even examine it.
We splashed onto the beach outside of the small pazuzu town, surrounded by a wall of water. I hadn’t realized the ocean water would get sucked in, too. Luckily the portal had closed the moment I’d been pulled through. I looked about to make sure both Katia and Tran had made it. They had.
Even though the portal had only been open for about three or four seconds, the spray of pressurized water had been enough to topple over the metal wall just outside the town of Pandinus. A guard tower had also fallen over. Further down the street, a wide-eyed pazuzu peered from his home. A chunk of metal had pierced through his front door, skewering it like a javelin. If we’d kept the gate open any longer, it would’ve done the same thing to this town that we’d done to the sandcastle. Whoops.
“Into town,” I said, “Quick.” Even though we were out of the water, I took another scroll of water breathing to stave off the vomiting that would incapacitate me. A steady wind blew across the beach. The sun had already gone down. The three of us turned and ran toward the closest pub.
New Achievement! Who Let the Gods Out?
You have allowed a feral god to enter your current realm. That is the equivalent of dropping a grenade down your pants and shouting, “Yolo!”
Here’s a fun fact. Other gods don’t like feral gods. They’ve been thrown into the Nothing for a reason. They tend to react to this sort of thing, depending on who you’ve brought out.
Reward: Whatever is about to happen is going to hit the Dungeon Crawler World blooper reel for sure.
We stumbled toward the closest inn. Gwen and the rest of her team were there, waiting for us. A pazuzu stared at us as we burst inside, sopping wet. “Follow me!” I yelled at the bartender, moving toward the door to the personal space. It didn’t follow, and I spent a maddening full minute giving permission to Gwen and her people so they could get inside.
We fell into the room, which was already packed, landing in a heap in front of Donut and Mordecai.
Donut leaped down from the counter and sniffed at me.
“Really, Carl. You smell terrible. And you have seaweed in your hair.”
I started to vomit seawater onto the floor.
Outside, the world rumbled.
28
Time to level collapse: 3 Days, 20 hours.
The walls shook. A terrible screeching filled the world. Multiple children sat within the safe room, just like the last time, and they all huddled together, no longer paying attention to the movie on the screen, which appeared to be the original Space Jam.
“Open your boxes,” Mordecai said, keeping his voice down. “Let the world settle first before we go out there and see what you did.”
Juice Box stood nearby in her human form, leaning over Ruby, the changeling girl with compression sickness. The armless child was also in human form, and her sunken-in head looked especially disconcerting. I thought of Henrik, who had died trying to do something, anything, to keep this from happening again to his people.
I continued to watch Juice Box. “What did she say?” I asked Mordecai, not moving yet to open my boxes. The woman patted the girl on the head and then moved to another group of children.
“I think she’ll do it, but not for free,” Mordecai said. “We offered to send them all through, but she is rightfully afraid of that option.”
> “Okay,” I said. “Let’s see if we survive the next few hours first.”
“Carl,” Donut said, also whispering. “Do you remember what happened with Fire Brandy and that dwarf on the last floor? When they started to remember, I mean.”
“I do,” I said. I remembered exactly what happened with Fire Brandy and Tizquick the dwarf. Once they realized they were NPCs, they’d killed themselves by crashing the Nightmare into the abyss.
“I think that’s happening with Juice Box, too. When we told her that her brother died, she said she was sad at first, but then she got really happy. Then she said she’d been dreaming that she was a school teacher, but a bunch of people came in and had to kill all of the students because the children were spreading a disease. She had touched one of the people who’d killed the children, and he was a dragon-headed guy. She has the ability to turn into one of those creatures, but she’s never really touched one. Only in her dream. Louis told her that was because she was an NPC and she was maybe remembering the last time she’d been in the dungeon, and she got a really funny look on her face. The same look you get when you look at that picture of Miss Beatrice on my nightstand.”
“We’ll need to be careful with her,” I said.
I also caught sight of Britney, the last surviving member of Vadim’s team. She’d been on the flying house, so she’d come in with Donut. She sat huddled up against the corner of the space where the crafting room met the back wall. She’d railed at him not to go, and he’d gone anyway. He’d died because of it.
He should’ve listened to her. We all would’ve been better off. I sighed.
I thumbed over my shoulder, indicating outside. “Mordecai, are those feral god things invulnerable like regular gods are?”
The Gate of the Feral Gods Page 41
